Talk
by Melpomene Lee
Summary: "Amy, come on, please don't cry. I hate it when people cry." Amy Santiago is late for work for the second time in her life and Rosa has to find out why. Rated T for some language.


I wrote this at the request of a friend who picked a prompt from a list of h/c dialogue tags and asked it to be about Amy and Rosa. I mostly wrote it in a three-hour politics class that I have on Wednesday nights but the title comes from the Coldplay song I would listen to when I was working outside of class. I'm very pleased with how it came out and I had a lot of fun writing it. I hope you enjoy it!

Talk

Something was off. The air in the precinct had a certain...indescribable quality that definitely did not point to anything good. Rosa glanced around the bullpen, trying to find the source of the disturbance.

Holt was in his office, calmly regarding some paperwork. No problems there, then. 9:00 in the morning and Hitchcock and Scully were already asleep at their desks. Exactly as it should be. Terry was eating his yogurt. Gina was painting her nails and ignoring the incessant ringing of the phone. Boyle was trying to coax something out of the microwave without burning himself. Failing miserably at it, too, she noted with some amusement. Peralta was running late and Amy was… Wait.

Rewind.

She looked again to make sure she was seeing it right.

Yep. Amy Santiago's desk was definitely empty.

Rosa double-checked her watch. 9:03. Something was up. Rosa didn't like it when something was up at the precinct. It was her job to solve mysteries in the outside world, not within the Nine-Nine.

She tried to shake her unease off as she headed to her desk, keeping one eye on the other side of the room and one ear on the elevator, and got to work. It was a Tuesday and she had no open cases at the moment, which meant she actually had to deal with the mountain of paperwork she had abandoned on Friday evening. Amy was usually the driving force behind paperwork getting done, but she had taken Friday off for the spa day that had been Jake's present for her most recent birthday, and Rosa herself had been out on Monday so the files had had time to stew and multiply over the weekend in surprising numbers.

She sighed, starting to regret some of the life choices that had led her to this moment, and reached for the first file on the edge of her desk.

Breaking and entering. Less than $500 taken from a bodega. A bodega that was in a rough neighborhood. Ugh. She could see this playing it out like it was a movie in her brain. She'd investigate. Crime techs would find fingerprints that matched half the criminals in Brooklyn. Probably a kid in a ski mask. Probably would strike again within the week at a different bodega. She could interview the owner later after CSU left, but in the meantime there wasn't a whole lot else to do on her part.

She looked at the clock again.

9:10. Still no Amy.

Rosa found herself feeling more than just uneasy. She was...concerned? Was that what this was? Possibly. This would not do. Feelings were for other people and concern was something she reserved for Arlo and Adrian when he had one of his night terrors. Amy didn't need to be fed and watered and taken outside to pee, and she wasn't the type to get night terrors, so Rosa should have absolutely no need to feel concerned for her.

9:14. Jake Peralta finally waltzed into the bullpen and plunked down at his desk, almost knocking over the massive pile of files he had somehow managed to amass since the day before.

"Hey, Jake," Rosa yelled across the room, maybe a bit louder than necessary. "Where's your girlfriend?"

"What are you talking about," he shot back without even looking up. "She left before I did."

Dammit.

Their apartment was a ten-minute drive from the precinct. Something was very wrong. Rosa stood up abruptly and grabbed her jacket.

"You just sat down, where the hell are you going?" Hitchcock demanded, apparently awake now.

"B and E. I'm gonna go knock on some doors."

O*o*o*o*o*o*o*o*O

It wasn't exactly a lie, but random doors in Brooklyn weren't going to be her first stop. Her real first stop was Security on the first floor to check all the tapes. If Amy had planned to drive to work, she either ran into problems before she got in her car or before she reached the precinct, and it was easier to search wherever was closer first.

"Mitchel!" The guard behind the desk jumped at her tone. Good. She was being sharper than usual. Something might actually get done now.

"Have you seen Detective Santiago today? She hasn't shown up for work."

Mitchel stuttered a bit. "W-w-what do you mean, she hasn't shown up for work?"

"Exactly what I said! Have you seen her?"

"Uh...possibly. Let me check the cameras." He started flipping through his screens. Rosa hovered over his shoulder, tapping the toe of her boot impatiently.

"Oh my god, are you even seeing anything?" The images in front of her were blurring like the flip-book they forced her to make in second grade.

"Oh yeah, they hired me for this job because I can process visual stimuli twenty times faster than the average person."

She blinked. "Seriously?"

He didn't answer, instead slamming the enter key hard enough to make Rosa jump this time.

"Detective Amy Santiago entered this building at precisely 8:55 this morning."

Rosa wrinkled her brow.

"That's five minutes before her shift started. What time did she leave?"

Mitchel flipped through another half-hour of video footage in about twenty seconds.

"She didn't. There's cameras all over this building and none of them show her exiting, by door, window, or secret tunnel. She's still in the building."

"What do you mean? She never made it to her desk. Where'd she go after she came in?"

Mitchel flipped back a couple of screens.

"Mmm...across the foyer. Into the elevator. Goes up...one floor. Yep she definitely got off at the second floor."

"Second floor? That's HR. Why the hell would she go there five minutes before her shift starts?"

Mitchel squinted at the screen. "Looks like she went into the second-floor bathroom."

"Wait, pause it." Rosa noticed something.

Amy's back was to the camera, but her posture was stiff and she was pressing one fist firmly against her mouth.

"She's sick. She's sick and she's still trying to come to work. Son of a bitch. Where'd she go after the bathroom?"

"She didn't."

"What?"

Mitchel shrugged. "There's nothing on tape of her leaving the bathroom. She must still be in there."

Rosa cursed under her breath. This was turning out to be more annoying than dramatic.

O*o*o*o*o*o*o*o*O

The second-floor women's bathroom was pretty much the same as all the other bathrooms in the building. Five stalls, four regular, one handicapped, three sinks, two paper towel dispensers, one hand-dryer that didn't actually dry your hands but was mandated by the city because...recycling or something.

Rosa paused in the doorway. It was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that happened when people were trying to hide.

"Amy? I know you're in here."

She listened. A soft shuffling came from the nearest stall but no answer. She stormed over.

"Your pants are up, Amy, I'm coming in." Rose jerked the door open.

Amy was standing but she definitely looked like she'd rather be lying down. Possibly in a casket. Her eyes were red and watery, her skin was clammy and pale, and when Rosa looked her up and down, her hands were shaking. The air in the stall smelled pretty strongly of vomit. Amy looked absolutely abysmal and Rosa found herself taken aback by it.

"You're… You were late for work and I didn't…" She had planned to start yelling but that clearly was the wrong tactic and now she didn't know how to respond.

"I'm fine," Amy sounded chokey. "I just...had a little tummy trouble. It's fine. I'm fine. I'll be up in a minute." She pulled the door closed again, leaving Rosa more confused and annoyed than before. She jerked the door open again.

"'Tummy trouble'?! You're almost forty-five minutes late! Why didn't you just call in sick?"

"Because I'm not sick," Amy practically exploded. "I'm fine! I'm just a little nauseous! Jake wanted to go to a new seafood restaurant last night and it didn't agree with me."

"Bullshit! Jake hates seafood and you're creeped out by live lobsters! Don't lie to me. What is going on?"

"Nothing, I swear to-oh god." Her face changed mid-sentence and before Rosa could close the door again, Amy whirled around and stuck her head into the toilet.

Rosa cringed. Vomit was...not her thing. At all. She gingerly reached for the handful of hair Amy had dropped in her haste and tried not to breathe through her nose.

Amy retched for what seemed like forever, even though she had nothing left to throw up but bile. Rosa gathered up the rest of her hair as it fell and stood there awkwardly. She hadn't even done this for friends in the Academy and she didn't exactly consider herself and Amy to be all that close.

Finally Amy gasped and pulled herself away from the toilet.

"I-I might be a bit too sick to work today."

She rose unsteadily to her feet, stumbled to the sink, pulled a toothbrush out of her purse and started carefully scrubbing at her teeth.

"Has this been happening for the last forty-five minutes?" Rosa demanded.

"Maybe," Amy admitted around a mouthful of toothpaste.

"Do you know why?"

"Yes."

"And it's not because of bad seafood." It wasn't a question and Amy didn't pretend to think it was, anyway.

"No, it's not."

"So what is it?" Rosa was pretty sure she knew the answer but she was somehow still surprised when Amy dug a little white stick out of her purse and flipped it over.

"I'm pregnant."

O*o*o*o*o*o*o*o*O

"You're pregnant?" Rosa had looked at the stick closely enough to see the dark pink lines indicating a positive result, but she wasn't touching anything marked with someone else's urine, even if Amy had sealed off the end with a plastic cap and duct tape.

"I found out yesterday." She sounded weirdly detached, like the reality wasn't settling in just yet. She turned back to the mirror and started fixing her makeup.

"Have you...told anyone else?" This was a very strange situation Rosa had found herself in. Unexpected. Unable to be planned for. Okay, then.

Amy shook her head. "I'm telling Jake tonight. He was asleep when I took the test and I didn't want to wake him up. He's been kind of stressed lately. What with Doug Judy and all."

"Right." Considerate. Very Amy. "Are you…" She steeled herself against what she was about to say.

"Are...you...okay?"

Maybe it was the fact that Rosa was showing concern for Amy for the first time in her entire life, maybe it was the hormones, maybe it was the fact that she was almost an hour late for work because she couldn't stop throwing up, but something in Amy's face seemed to crumble at that moment.

"I...I don't…" she trailed off, brush falling from her hands, gripping the sides of the sink so hard her knuckles were white.

"Oh, no." Rosa knew what was coming. Before she had a chance to run, Amy shoulders shuddered violently and she started crying. Hard. The kind of crying that indicates the depth of the problem is too great to conceal and it doesn't even matter who's watching. The kind of crying Rosa Diaz was absolutely **not** prepared to deal with at 10:00 on a Tuesday morning. She took a tentative step forward as Amy slumped to the floor.

"Um. Oh, god. Uh- It's- Amy? Amy, it'll… It'll be...fine?"

Shit. This wasn't working.

"Amy, come on, please don't cry. I hate it when people cry."

That didn't work either since Amy only cried harder in response. To her own growing horror, Rosa found herself sliding to sit down next to her friend.

"I'm not ready for this," Amy wailed. "I had a plan! I had a binder for how this was going to go! We'd live together for a while, then get married, then wait a couple years, then have a baby."

"Yeah, that doesn't seem to have worked out."

Wrong thing to say.

Amy responded by putting her head on Rosa's shoulder and sobbing into her new leather jacket.

Okay, then.

Rosa let her cry since trying to comfort people with words clearly wasn't her thing, but she also didn't try to give her a hug or anything because that was just hardcore no.

Finally Amy seemed to have cried herself out and started wiping at her eyes.

"I'm sorry. I know this isn't your thing."

"No, it's...fine." It didn't sound super convincing but to Rosa's own surprise she did mean it.

Amy took it as a signal to keep going. "Jake and I haven't even started talking about kids, yet."

The ball had started rolling and no one was going to stop it now. Amy was going to talk her way through this and Rosa was going to hear her out.

"I mean, I know he likes kids, but I have no idea if he ever wanted any of his own."

Rosa shifted a bit on the cold tile floor.

"I mean, I'm pretty sure he still sees himself as a kid, so I don't know if he's even thought that far ahead yet."

Amy sniffled a bit, trying to laugh, however wryly. "Yeah, I guess." This was shaping up to be a very weird day for both of them.

"Look," Rosa finally said. "I know you like your plans and your binders and your set path, but like… The world doesn't always work that way. How many times have you had to cancel dates because some dumbass got drunk and peed somewhere they weren't supposed to?"

"Twenty-five," Amy said immediately. "Oh, that was supposed to be rhetorical, wasn't it?"

"You follow me, though?"

"A baby's a bit more of a big deal than a guy peeing in public, though."

"My point , Amy. Do you get it?"

"Yeah. God laughs at your plans."

"Exactly. Just because something didn't happen when you expected it to doesn't mean it's a bad thing."

Amy lowered her head again.

"I'm just not sure if I'm ready to be a mom. You've seen me talk to kids."

"Haha, yeah. You're a disaster."

Amy groaned miserably as Rosa hastened to correct herself.

"I mean, you are now. Kid's not even born yet. You'll figure it out."

Amy laughed dryly. "You just want me to stop talking."

"No, I mean it! You're a freaking detective , Amy. It's literally your job to figure shit out. Just treat it like another case."

Amy scoffed. "Ah, yeah. Detective Santiago cracks the case of how babies happen and where they come from."

"Oh my god that's not what I'm talking about and you know it."

Amy paused for a second and then nodded. "Yeah, I do."

"Look." Rosa pulled away from Amy and rocked to her feet. "You've got time to figure all this out."

Amy took the hand that was offered and dragged herself up. "First thing you have to do anyway is tell Jake. Just do that and go from there."

Amy took a deep breath. "Yeah. I guess you're right."

"Cool. I'll tell Holt you're taking a sick day."

Amy didn't even try to argue. She had at least six months of them saved up.

Rosa turned to leave but stopped when Amy said her name. Bad move. Amy pulled her into a huge before she could react.

"Thank you. You're a good friend."

"You're welcome," Rosa found herself saying without a hint of her usual sarcasm.

Super weird day.

She heard the speed-dial on Amy's phone blip as she left the bathroom.

"Jake? Yeah, I'm okay. Sorry. Listen, can you come downstairs? I need to talk to you about something."

Fin


End file.
